Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  Walking through the park, she tried to shake off this memory and all the other musings to do with cancer – it was so maddening to find her head full of the subject when she’d set out determined to enjoy a long walk without a thought of it. She was sick of it, this constant, repetitive going over of old ground. She didn’t want to do it, she wanted to fill her mind with other concerns. Work, for example.

  On Monday, she was going to represent a client before an employment tribunal. It was a case of unfair dismissal and she was looking forward to fighting it. Her client was a funny little woman, not impressive in appearance and with an unfortunate stutter which sometimes made what she said unintelligible. But the story she had to tell had roused Rachel to fury on her behalf and she had worked long hours meticulously amassing evidence of malicious treatment by the client’s employer. She was going to show him for what he was: a bully, a cheat, a man who had done his best to humiliate and distress her client in order to make her resign, and then, when he had failed, had concocted the most absurd charge of negligence against her, giving him grounds for dismissal. Rachel could hardly wait to stand up and face him.

  But before that, there was a weekend ahead, and the Sunday would see her begin to do something she had wanted to do for a long time. She was going to learn to fly, to fly a glider. She was going to learn to get as near to the flight of a bird as possible, to soar over fields and rivers in perfect peace and quiet, leaving all the cares of earth behind.

  5

  A Garden is a Lovesome Thing . . .

  STANDING IN HER garden, waiting for the girl to arrive, Mrs Hibbert watched a small plane fly away to the east, towards the aerodrome, and then she looked at the lilac trees. She had three lilac trees, two of the purple variety and one white. She had planted them herself when she first bought her house and they had thrived over the years so that now they were indeed proper trees and not bushes. She loved them, both for their scent and their beautifully shaped blossoms. She filled jugs with the lilac she picked and distributed throughout her rooms so that the whole house smelled of them – intoxicating!

  Her grandfather had wanted her to be named ‘Lilac’, a ridiculous idea, laughed to extinction by her mother. Nobody was called Lilac. Rose (her sister’s name), Daisy, Iris, Violet, Lily – plenty of flowers gave their names to girls, but not lilac. It was her Grandfather’s fault, though, that she had been christened not Mary (the name she told people was hers) but Marigold. Her parents had found Marigold acceptable, and they had wanted to please the old (and wealthy) man. Besides, they had quickly seen that Marigold could be shortened to Mari and, when grandfather Lawson died, turned into Mary, which was precisely what happened. She hated her real Christian name, though liked the flower and always had marigolds in her borders. All massed together they made a gloriously cheerful sight. Francis had been amused when, on their wedding day, she had been obliged to divulge it. He had often thereafter-referred to her as his sunny little marigold, usually when she was being cross. It had made her laugh, and brought her out of her temper.

  Nobody called her Marigold now, and only Dot addressed her as Mary. To everyone else, she was Mrs Hibbert, and proud of it. She couldn’t understand the modern fashion for married women keeping their maiden names and being known as Miss or, absurdly, Ms. Her status as a married woman had pleased her and once she had been widowed the prefix ‘Mrs’ had comforted her. It meant nobody could mistake her for a spinster. She remembered how her grandfather used to refer to his own wife as Mrs Lawson when in company, never as Clara, even if those present were family. As well as a liking for formality, it was from her grandfather she had inherited a love of gardens and gardening.

  His garden had been a work of art (that was how it had been referred to locally, in the most reverential way). It was not part of his house, which had only a thin strip of land round it, but was separated from it by a field. The garden he had created was enclosed by a wall, built with mellow, old yellow bricks. Along the outside he’d planted pear trees so that in the spring the wall was almost obliterated by white blossom. It was quite a walk to the garden, across the road (a quiet, little-used road, barely wide enough for a large car) then along a track down the side of the field and over a stream at the bottom. Her grandfather enjoyed the walk, liked seeing the cows grazing. He owned the field, and all the fields surrounding his garden, and let them out to farmers to graze cattle or sheep. Because of the trees and the high, solid wall, these animals were no threat to his garden, entered through strong oak doors. It was always exciting for Mari to watch her grandfather lift up the metal bar which held the double doors together and step over the threshold to be met, in the summer, by the sight of scores of rose bushes, all of them in shades of red. He would walk her round the roses, telling her their names, and it was like a kind of poetry, reciting them after him.

  The roses grew wild and straggly when he died. Mari’s father had wanted to sell the garden itself and the fields, but her mother, Irene, had protested that this would be an act of vandalism, so her father had agreed to keep the garden (though he went ahead and sold the fields except the one giving access to the garden) with one proviso: Irene should be responsible for its upkeep. This alarmed Irene who knew nothing at the time about gardening, but she agreed. She kept on Mr Thompson, who had been Grandfather Lawson’s chief gardener, and hired a young boy, Adam Nicholson, the local butcher’s son, to help him. She got Mr Thompson (though he thought it a form of heresy, and muttered on about its being a scandal) to dig up most of the roses and began to plant shrubs instead. She liked lavatera and lavender and other flowering shrubs. She also had Mr Thompson make a little pond at the far end of the garden and round this she grew purple iris and blue-flowering hostas. Her whole idea was to create a natural, graceful bower and do away with the formality of the rigid rows of roses. Blues and pinks were her favourite colours and she was delighted when bluebells naturalised (Mr Thompson had vowed they would not) and forget-me-nots flourished. It took several years, but by the time Mary was ten, her mother had the kind of garden she wanted.

  Mary used to go with her mother down to the garden every day in the spring and summer. She would come home from school – this was before she went to boarding-school – and change her clothes, and hand-in-hand the two of them would set off, her mother carrying a basket to fill with flowers for the house. Mary was always glad when she could see that neither Mr Thompson nor Adam was in the garden. She wasn’t afraid of Mr Thompson, it was just that she felt awkward when he spoke to her because she couldn’t understand his accent, but she was afraid of Adam Nicholson. He was a big boy, bigger than she, though they were roughly the same age, and he had a habit of stopping whatever he was doing to stare at her in the most disconcerting way. He stared first at her feet (which were large, she knew, but not monstrously so) and then slowly moved his stare up her body, taking a very long time to get to her face. When he did, he always dropped his stare and turned away. It made her blush. She thought him impudent, and complained to her mother. Her mother had a word with Mr Thompson, and the next time she met Adam in the garden, sent there early one evening to deliver a message to Mr Thompson, he blocked her path. She’d told him to get out of her way, but he’d stood his ground, and stared. It was she who stepped off the path and ran home, telling her mother she couldn’t find Mr Thompson. She said nothing about Adam, feeling, as she did, confused about her feelings, and sensing she’d somehow lost a peculiar contest of wills.

  Irene taught Mary how to prune and graft, how to nurture seeds, how to treat the various diseases to which plants were prone. When people asked Mary what she wanted to be when she grew up she said: ‘A gardener.’ This amused them, but she was not taken seriously. Gardening, for a girl, was a pleasant enough hobby in the 1930s and 1940s – it went with being a home-maker – but it was not a career. A career, in any case, was not something the Lawson parents envisaged for their daughters. A daughter’s role was to stay at home and look after her parents in due course. One of them might get m
arried. Till that happened, they could both occupy themselves with church activities and good works in the neighbourhood. It was their brothers who would have the careers, one in law, one in business.

  The Second World War changed things for the Lawson girls. The fortunes of the family suffered a reversal of a kind Mary never quite understood – suddenly, her parents were no longer well-off and Grandfather Lawson’s money had been used up. She did once ask what exactly had happened to cause the frightening talk of tightening belts and doing without, but nobody ever enlightened her. She had hoped to go into the sixth form but was abruptly taken out of school when she was 16, in 1946, and was told she must get a job to help out. ‘What job?’ she had asked her father, and he had been cross. ‘Any job,’ he’d said, ‘anything that will bring in a little money.’ To say this was a shock was not precisely true – ‘shock’ implied something unpleasant, and Mary had not thought of it like that. She’d been excited at the prospect of being allowed to earn money. Until, that is, she tried to do so and found how hard it was going to be. Once more she had ventured to suggest she could find employment as a gardener, but her father had been furious, saying they had not come to that yet, that he felt disgraced enough by having to tell her and Rose to get jobs without having to witness his daughter being a manual labourer.

  There had been enough money, just, for her and her sister to do a shorthand and typing course. Afterwards, Rose got a job immediately in an insurance firm but only worked for six months before marrying the younger partner, much to her parents’ satisfaction: that was Rose off their hands, one less mouth to feed, or so they thought (in fact, Rose was widowed within two years and returned home). Mary, though she had been much better than Rose at both shorthand and typing, took a while to secure employment. She knew why. Rose was pretty. Simple as that. Mary took her certificates, attesting to her competence, along to interviews, but they did not seem to impress. Eventually, after several humiliating weeks when she was turned down for position after position in their small town, she was offered a job in a solicitor’s office. Her boss was an elderly, bad-tempered, very demanding man but she suited him. She didn’t get upset when he shouted at her, or flustered when he asked her to do three things at once. Everyone else in the building was frightened of him (including the other two partners) but Mary was not. It was reckoned she could cope with him. In time, Mary became a valued employee and was treated with respect and caution in spite of her youth. She might have stayed there for ever if her parents had not died, one after the other in the space of a year, and she came into some money when the house and garden were sold.

  It hurt having to watch the garden be sold, but her brothers insisted. She was determined to put her plan into action. Her plan was to train as a gardener. She was by then 23, past the normal age for college entry, but she didn’t care. Her two years at Ramsbeck were among the happiest in her life. Once she’d qualified, the problem was that yet again she found it hard to get a job, not, however, because of not being pretty but simply because she was a woman. Men were preferred for all the posts she went for. She had to go back to being a legal clerk in yet another solicitor’s office, this time further south in Manchester. For a while, she’d toyed with the idea of studying law and becoming a solicitor herself, but she felt too old to embark on yet another period of study. Becoming a legal assistant, a step up from clerk, was as far as she progressed in the practice. Slowly, her life had settled into two distinct compartments: work, where she was not unhappy, enjoying her job even if it wasn’t one she had wanted, and pleasure, her garden, to which she devoted all her spare time. Her friends were all male (with one exception), made through gardening, and they were good friends, who appreciated her knowledge and skills. She belonged to. a gardening club, and went on visits to gardens and to lectures about them, and had thought her life centred round gardens until she met Francis.

  Every time she walked round her garden at this time of year and admired the lilac, Mrs Hibbert saw in her mind’s eye Francis standing under the white lilac tree in the square opposite the office. She’d looked out of the window in front of her desk, where she was pounding away, typing out the dreary details of someone’s will, and she saw a young man motionless under the tree. He had golden hair, curly and quite long, and his face was tilted up, an expression of rapture upon it. She could tell he was breathing in the scent of the lilac and she found herself breathing in too, though in the office all there was to breathe was the stale smell of too many people in too small a room with the windows closed. Later, she’d taken her sandwiches into the square to eat, but the man had gone. Every day till the lilac blossom was over, he was there, standing in the same position. One day, she managed to be there at the same time. She would never have spoken to him if it had not been for the wind that day blowing the lilac blossom into her eyes. She’d given a little cry and taken a handkerchief to flick the blossom away. ‘Let me,’ he’d said, and carefully removed the bits in the corner of her left eye.

  Mrs Hibbert looked up now at the white lilac, and smiled. No one knew how romantic the moment had been. Fate had brought them together, courtesy of a lilac tree. She walked on, looking at her wrist-watch now and again, hoping this Emma girl would be on time. First of all she would give her a tour of the garden, pointing out particularly precious plants, and then she would take her into the greenhouse. There hadn’t been a greenhouse when, after Francis died, she’d moved back here and bought this house. The garden had been in good shape, though, and the couple she had bought the property from had had plans for a greenhouse, though not in the position she’d selected. The Emma girl was late. Mrs Hibbert hated unpunctuality. She had seen this day coming, the day when she would have to start being at least partially dependent on other people. Neglect showed so quickly in a garden – even a two-week holiday at the wrong time of year could be pretty disastrous. A house could survive very well without constant care, it could remain undusted for ages and then be put to rights in a matter of hours, but a garden couldn’t. She already had Martin Yates to cut the hedges and the grass but he didn’t want to weed, alas. He was a good worker though and they had become friends; she valued his support when she had to do tricky things like invest in a new lawn-mower. She took him with her and recognised at once that he knew about lawn-mowers and could give her good advice. He wasn’t a mechanic, but he had worked in a car factory at one time and seemed to have some mechanical aptitude. At any rate, he was good at mending things and Mrs Hibbert had begun to depend on him as a general handyman too. He was quiet and dependable, and the only mystery about him was how he came to be married to Ida Yates.

  At last, she was here. Mrs Hibbert saw the girl dismount from her bicycle and fling it down carelessly on the path. She was entirely inappropriately dressed for gardening, wearing some sort of floaty skirt and those absurd flip-flops on her feet. Mrs Hibbert warned herself not to start off this relationship by being critical. She practised speaking gently and softly in her head as she walked towards Emma but heard her own voice sounding harsh as she said, ‘I hope you’ve brought proper shoes and some overalls, young lady,’ which was not what she had meant to say at all. Surprisingly, Emma had. She brandished a bag, and out of it she took a pair of denim dungarees and some training shoes. She promptly put them on, pulling the dungarees over her skirt which seemed to disappear quite easily inside them. She was a pretty girl, blonde and slim with a sweet, open face and a cheerful countenance. Nothing Mrs Hibbert said seemed to offend her – she took correction very well and was quick to say sorry. She would do (that was Mrs Hibbert’s verdict after the first session). Her ignorance of all things pertaining to gardening was not, after all, going to be an insuperable handicap, because she was intelligent and picked up instructions quickly. But, Lord, how she talked, chatter chatter all the time. Later on, while she was being shown how to graft cuttings one afternoon she chattered non-stop about her mother (an apparently very depressed woman who did nothing but read) and her sister (a musical genius) and her boyfrien
d. It was the chatter about the boyfriend which irritated Mrs Hibbert most. She moved away whenever Emma got going on how wonderful the boy was, but the hint was not taken – a full 20 yards down the garden from Emma and she could still hear her droning on. It was inevitable that, though she had no desire to, Mrs Hibbert found herself soon knowing more about Emma’s problems, especially with regard to the boyfriend, than she wanted to. The girl beseeched her for her advice and that was one thing Mrs Hibbert could never resist.

  He was called Luke. He had the impertinence to telephone during the third afternoon Emma was gardening and ask to speak to her. ‘It’s Luke,’ he said, though his diction was so frightful that this came out as, ‘It’s Sluke.’ He said he needed to speak to Emma as a matter of the gravest urgency and he was so convincing that Mrs Hibbert found herself almost running to the greenhouse where Emma was transferring seedlings from trays to pots. It turned out that the ‘gravest urgency’ was that ‘Sluke needed to change the time of their proposed evening meeting. Mrs Hibbert was outraged and told Emma he would cry wolf once too often, but the girl didn’t seem to get the reference. After this, whenever ‘Sluke rang, he was told that Emma was unavailable but that a message could safely be left for her. The messages were always the same: ‘Tell her to ring a.s.a.p.’ Mrs Hibbert did pass them on but said that Emma would have to wait to use the phone, because she was expecting an important call. (Well, she could play that game too.)